Electric Motorcycles: How would they change our riding experience? I own a bike, and I would like to believe I am in sort of a comfort zone around its maintenance. I know it's service intervals, and over a period of time, I have managed to learn a little about the mechanical aspect too. Many riders even have a list of upgrades/modifications for their motorcycles which they have refined over months if not years. ECU remaps, aftermarket air filters, exhausts and spark plugs. Using branded engine oil rather than the generic service centre provided one. All this is bound by the presence of an internal combustion engine in our bikes. But have you ever stopped to think how this will all change with the advent of electric motorcycles? And how an electric motorcycle manufacturer would likely be different from conventional manufacturer?
You hear a rattling sound from one of the hard to reach places on your motorcycle. No worries, you think, next time you are cleaning the carburettor, you will fix it. It's most likely a loose screw anyway. The reason for this confidence is you are very familiar with the precautions you need to take while working on an internal combustion engine. Stay away from the hot bits, don't smoke in the vicinity and do not ever play with fireworks around the bike and so on.
But with an electric bike, all these familiar precautions will be redundant, or at least will become very unfamiliar. AFAIK, electric bikes don't get hot, electricity doesn't smell, and the batteries are never really “off”. To complicate matters more, there is an astonishing amount of electrical energy is contained in that “always on” battery and it's the Direct Current type too, the most dangerous type of electricity to be around! To get an idea, just log on to YouTube and see what happens when even a small lithium-ion battery of a smart phone gets punctured. This futuristic electric bike stuff can be properly dangerous in the wrong hands, riding around with a tank of highly inflammable liquid between your legs, while controlled explosions go off under you start to feel sane by comparison.
This will drastically change our behaviour when you and I become electric bike owners. We may think thrice before poking around with a screwdriver, with the knowledge that live electricity lurks in our bikes. Suddenly installing after market ECU’s, spark plugs and exhausts, will become very different if not redundant. Especially with the realisation that we can't tinker around with an electric bike as much we could with a petrol powered one.
I think it would still be possible to perform simple modifications, like installing brake, clutch levers etc on your own, without frying yourself, but the prevalence of electric bikes will most certainly mark the end of doing almost all of the maintenance or repairs yourself. An argument could be made that servicing the bike won't change radically. Because some consumables will be carried forward on electric bikes too. Such as tyres, brake pads, perhaps chain adjustment too. But that's probably it. No carburettors or fuel injection systems to worry about. No valve clearances, air filters, piston kits. No engine oil and oil filters and the rest of it to think about.
One more aspect where change will take place is where we take our electric bikes for repairs and service. Taking it to a FNG is out of the question, at least in the initial period. Also electric bike manufacturers are producing highly different bikes with customized parts and technology which may not be necessarily shared with the people at large, so dropping your electric bike at a FNG may no longer be possible. You will have to go to the manufacturer's dealership to get even the most trivial issues resolved, where the technicians would have been trained by the manufacturer to work safely on their bikes. And the probability of these service centre to be scarce is pretty high.
An electric bike manufacturer would also be different from a conventional bike manufacturer. I believe that an electric bike company is somewhere between an automotive company and a software company as they would have to devote considerably more resources than a conventional bike company on software development. We have all encountered “bugs” on our phones and computers and they are often mildly annoying. But such a “bug”on an electric motorcycle, could result in a crash. It would be imperative that the software on the bike works perfectly all the time. Hence, software development will be an important part of an electric bike manufacturer's headache.
We also would think about the power source differently. Batteries tend to perform differently depending upon their age, how they have been used and charged and even atmospheric conditions. Electric bikes also face challenges different to an electric car. For example, in a Tesla car, an air conditioning system is used to keep the batteries at a constant temperature, so the car performs as optimally as possible. There's no such system available on a bike that I know of, so the software on the ECU, will have to continually assess the atmospheric conditions, and work out the most optimal solution for the battery.
In conclusion, it's easy to think that the difference between a conventional and electric motorcycle is whether you plug into a wall socket or fill up with petrol. The changes go deeper than just that. Electric motorcycles are going to be a enormous part of our future, but our riding experiences will also be changed in many more ways than we might imagine! Interesting times ahead.
Wonder how much of this can be extrapolated to electric cars?
Last edited by Shumi_21 : 3rd June 2018 at 22:36.
Reason: Typos
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